Friends
You know September is off to an awful start when down 100 Dow points doesn’t seem too bad, considering that we were down more than 300 points on the Dow Jones Industrial Average early this morning. I hope we have more to look forward to this month than just accepting that the market didn’t collapse each day. We came off the holiday weekend with Europe having had a terrible session on Monday and it was obvious we were going to trade down for the third day in a row in September. Gold, after being up nicely this morning, finished the day up just $5 at $1882 per ounce.
The S&P 500 was down more than 8 points to finish the day at 1165 after trading down near 1140 earlier in the day. We have suspected that stocks were going to test the August lows here soon. What we hope to see is a higher low put in each time we go down. That could be helpful in developing a less painful bottoming process. What we don’t want to see is 1101 on the S&P violated. That would potentially send us to lower lows and a new phase in this pullback (bear market).
On the economic front the ISM non-manufacturing number (service sector) once again was not good, but not nearly as bad as we had feared. It sure doesn’t mean we are out of the woods when it comes to a new leg of recession, but it also indicates that there is a chance we can muddle along here in a slow growth mode.
We will be watching Europe tomorrow and of course we have the President’s job plan (speech) coming on Thursday. We’ll keep you informed.
Have a nice evening everyone.
